This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

At the end of the calendar year and into the new year,

the 99 p. I staff collects a bunch of short joyful little stories that are fun

to produce and make us happy. We call the many stories. This is the third and final episode of

this batch and the 14th volume overall, and it's a good one. We have stories about surprisingly architectural

sports commentary, Ben Franklin's role in daylight saving time and the origin of

the fire pole.

Wake the kids, stay with us.

So, I'm with a little.

So I'm with producer Emmett Fitzgerald and Emmett if passed as president you either have a

sports story for us or an environmental story for us. So which is it? This week it's sports Roman. Fantastic, okay. I am

ready. All right so as I imagine you might have noticed I got pretty into biking during the pandemic. I did notice you

would put a little note on slack that would say like I'm going to be gone for the

next hour and it was like and it was because you were biking. Yeah, I mean I had ridden bikes before COVID hit,

but I kind of leveled up during the pandemic.

I took that canceled gym membership money

and bought a road bike and some of the proper outfits and started riding

up and down the East Bay Hills torturing myself and then a few months in you

know to this new hobby the the Tour de France happened.

And I had never really watched the Tour of France before, but I figured, you know,

I'm into this now, give this a try.

And what was immediately clear was that it's just like a very different spectacle from the other kinds of sports that I was used to watching, things like basketball or soccer.

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